Action, Omission & Attentional Bias

Primes about systematic biases in whether and how agents act, weighing confirming evidence, others' payoffs, and proportional response against a preference for acting or for staying passive, and about what becomes visible or invisible to notice and act on.

8 primes in this family — primes that sit near one another in abstraction space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Action Bias — When acting and not acting have similar expected payoffs, decision-makers systematically prefer to act, because action is more visible and attributable than inaction, biasing choice toward doing something beyond what the payoff calculus justifies.
• Confirmation Bias — Favor confirming evidence.
• Feedforward — A predictive model of an action's consequences is interposed upstream of commitment, so the actor pre-corrects rather than waits for a deviation to feed back.
• Omission Bias — When acting and not acting carry similar expected outcomes, decision-makers systematically prefer inaction, judging a harm caused by acting as worse than an equal-or-greater harm caused by failing to act, because commission feels more causally and morally attributable than omission.
• Other-Regarding Preferences — An agent's evaluation of outcomes depends not only on its own payoff but on the payoffs of other agents.
• Proportionality — Match response to scale.
• Signifier — A perceptible cue placed on or near an action possibility so the possibility is recognized in time to be used—what makes an affordance perceivable, not what makes it possible.
• Vantage-Induced Omission — An apparatus's structural vantage makes some regions of a landscape reachable and others constitutively invisible, so its output is mistaken for the landscape rather than the landscape-restricted-to-its-vantage.